The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940

Preface: The Spanish Heritage

Preface The Spanish Heritage “An interest in mission ruins and Indian relics has been known to lead to an interest in Mexicans and Indians,” wrote Carey McWilliams with optimism in North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States, his 1949 book about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Although he despaired it would never be, McWilliams believed a more critical southwestern cultural history could become an agent for national civil rights and cultural pluralism. The war against the spread of fascism had ended, and the cold-war anticommunist crusade was flourishing throughout America. A prominent Los Angeles attorney, social justice activist, and prolific writer, McWilliams lamented the lost possibilities of a domestic, antifascist movement during the Depression and war that could have been led by labor radicals in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), affluent white liberals, and socialists. He had spent the entire decade writing four books about racial and cultural relations in California, the Southwest, and the United States. In Los Angeles, McWilliams assisted the eventual acquittal of seventeen young Mexican American men in the Sleepy Lagoon Case; the men had been wrongly convicted of second-degree murder and lesser offenses in the death of José Díaz in 1942. McWilliams also joined his friend Louis Adamic and other civil-rights activists in the journal Common Ground, pushing his idea of social democracy, citizenship rights, and interracial cooperation during the fight against fascism. The Common Ground writers did not espouse an uncritical nationalism on the home front. Rather, their perspective was one of radical, legal-based pluralism and federal intervention on race problems. McWilliams hoped remnants of colonial southwestern heritage could promote greater intercultural understanding . His pronouncement also expressed mourning for the demise of the Popular Front and its vision of social democracy.1 In this intriguing statement, McWilliams referred to the public culture in Southern California and the Southwest, a regional tradition he —xv— xvi Preface defined as the Spanish “fantasy heritage.” The fantasy heritage was the invented tradition created by white Californians to interpret the historical legacy of Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans in the Southwest. Mostly inaccurate, ahistorical, and suffused with excessive sentimentality and romanticism, the fantasy heritage was the cultural gloss for the economic development and promotion of Southern California. The story of the fantasy heritage resembled a harmonious family reunion of benevolent Franciscan Fathers, ignorant but grateful Indians, cruel military governors, deceitful Mexican liberals, and indolent rancheros all united under the thrum of guitars and the click of the castanet at a grandee’s ranch fiesta. Then a productive, enterprising, and confidently superior race of white Protestants turned the milk and honey of the Mexican era into a dynamic capitalist society after 1848. All members of Spanish society lived under a presumed religious egalitarianism. And all citizens lived without disagreement and want. Villainous Mexican liberals and Anglo Americans, with their lust for extravagance and natural resources, had destroyed an ecclesiastical Eden where the scientific revolution and secular individualism swayed few minds. Spanish society was supposedly one of paternal obligation held together by the holy faith.2 Carefully reading between the lines of the fantasy heritage, McWilliams believed the early commercial origins of “modern Spanish heritage” also had been influenced by the progressive ethos of the early twentieth century and deeper strands of Christian humanism.3 Cultural awareness could be redemptive in a society riddled with racial and social divisions. He hoped California citizens, tourists, seekers of exotica, and curio collectors would move beyond the romantic commercialism of the fantasy heritage into real history with an egalitarian social politics. For McWilliams, the word “fantasy” in the Spanish heritage perhaps represented deeper longings for the way race relations should have been improved through better intercultural understanding. In his earlier book, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946), McWilliams argued the very newness of California appeared “in fact, to have compelled, to have demanded, the evocation of a mythology which could give people a sense of continuity in a region long characterized by rapid social dislocations.” He initially understood how social-reform xvii The Spanish Heritage politics and lyrical romance defined the origins of the modern Spanish heritage. Both sentiments literally flowed from the same wellspring.4 By 1949, McWilliams despaired that the Spanish heritage had become something entirely different. Commercial interests had created social distance between Anglos, ethnic Mexicans, and Indians. The sale...